“I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer.”
- Andy Warhol
One of only two known fully-finished works on paper from the rare Diagram Paintings series, Andy Warhol’s Dance Steps, 1962, is a unique and extraordinarily fine example of Warhol’s draftsmanship. An early commentary on a society increasingly preoccupied with self-perception and fame, Dance Steps performs the role of social guide both materially and metaphorically, serving not only as choreographic demonstration, but also as a diagram for the viewer’s hopeful entrée into society.
Experimenting with the concept of beauty, Warhol captured in these early works a sense of vulnerability, playing upon a nation’s newfound awareness of the concept of self-improvement. In his Wigs and Make him want you advertisements, both 1961, the artist anticipated his later promulgation of the commerciality that characterized the post-war era, reframing a visual identity that encouraged cultural uniformity. Warhol’s Dance Diagrams, though, are a marked departure from his other “beauty” paintings and drawings, explicitly illustrating the “how-to” of personal development, rather than the cosmetic and commercial fruits of self-enrichment.
Appropriated from images found in two books published by the Dance Guild in the 1950s, Lindy Made Easy (with Charleston) and Fox Trot Made Easy, Warhol would carefully remove the pages of these books, attaching them to makeshift supports, and then project these readymade instructions onto his canvas to trace each figure. For Warhol, each step, numbered and clearly marked “R” or “L”, represented a step closer to the ideal. In Dance Steps, however, the artist strays from his own modular process, skillfully rendering a freehand drawing of this diagram, renouncing the mechanical painting process that would become axiomatic of the work in his most prolific period. An initially shy, self-conscious artist, Warhol provided his audience, and himself, a manual to the social instruments that could transform not only the person, but his entire life.
